Paula Hepburn, profile and works

Analysis of Black Friday Parody (Artefact no.2)

My second attempt at a spreadable artefact came solely from the disappointing reception of my first video; things needed to change. I decided to use the concept a current trending topic, as this already exhibits huge amount of traffic, which would be a lot easier than starting a trend itself. Then, with a stroke of luck, came the relatively new phenomenon to the UK, gained a mass of media attention: Black Friday. This time I had to respond quick and with only 24 hours after Black Friday I had a parody published to YouTube; here are the reasoning and objectives for Black Friday 2014, Downfall parody:

The black Friday incentive

With Black Friday, 5th December “confirmed as the biggest online shopping day of the year in the UK for the first time”, accords to the Telegraph online. The media that surrounded the event and unfortunate behaviour of some of the British public took the media buy storm. Delving further into YouTube searches for black Friday on Google trends you can see not only a peak at December 2014, but at every December over the past 10 years:

Furthermore, making use of other black Friday popular searches could be advantages:

As spoke about in my initial post, the word ‘Friday’ itself has a popular search request on Fridays.

STEPPS

As stated in my initial post I demonstrated principles such as Triggers, Social currency and public to draw in public views and distribution.

Distribution

For this second piece of work I decided distribution would need to be taken more seriously so I decided to openly ‘pitch’ my work on well established social media groups. My preliminary publishes where to the usual media’s I use, such as Facebook and Twitter. Additionally using a direct share button on YouTube I was able to post my work on reddit:

Then after watching some rather hilarious videos on a popular facebook groups named ‘The manc’ Bible’ and ‘The Lad Bible’ I decided to share the video on any Black Friday related post on those groups, with the hope that the some of the combined 710,325 followers may pay attention:

Tags and Title

From my previous artefact, I discovered that tagging and title make a vast difference to finding the video on the internet, so I decided to tag the page with as many relatable words as possible :

A week later I had the idea to add another extremely exercised word into the tagging : ‘Kardashian’.

As the Kardashian family are a well known celebrity family with one member being known by the world wide press to of ‘broke the internet’ with some extreme photographs, courtesy of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood.

Although this can seem as misleading, it’s a trait many companies use to draw interest to a publication.

Analysis

The Black Friday 2014 Downfall parody has been active on YouTube for 2 weeks, 2 days and has received 76 views, and one share on Facebook:

The YouTube anylitics line graph above show the peak 36 views on the video on 30/11/2014, a day after publication and two days after ‘Black Friday’ itself. This is probably due to its media popularity at the time.

Anylitics also demonstrates that 44% of the video was watched from external websites, meaning facebook, reddit and twitter were responsible for nearly half the views.

The video was unsuccessful in spreading across a wide platform over its 16 day exposure, reasons for this may include:

Recognition– Black Friday is an even only participated in North America, Canada and UK. This could possibly hinder a world-wide search.

Films characteristics– The ‘downfall’ theme may of come across distasteful or even offensive to some viewers, although I did show this to several Jewish friends to check its suitability some people may of found it offensive.

Language– This was an English subtitles video, therefore reducing the viewers to an English reading audience.

Time– As you can see from the YouTube analytics the video was most popular around the time of Black Friday, and therefore interest for this video may of quickly been lost soon after the event was over.

Quantity– Although using many over-used tags could be advantageous it also opens the spectrum for searches; the increase in popularity results in more artefacts to search through. This means although using a ‘kardashian’ tag may of put the video into another matrix of popular words, the number of ‘Kardashian’ search results on youtube is huge: